Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (review)

“Studies on the emotions became popular in the analytically oriented philosophy of mind in the 1980s” (1), the author begins, but the status of emotion as reason’s rival or complement in the directing of human nature is, of course, of perennial interest to philosophy per se. True, the topic has acquired (and not just in the analytic school) a certain prominence in recent decades, and this has led to useful historical investigations, although, as the author says, many more of them have been on emotions in ancient than in medieval philosophy (ibid.). In four chapters, he presents a continuous history of philosophical reflection on emotion from Plato to the fourteenth-century Franciscan Adam Wodeham, and late medieval compendia. Along the way he summarizes and comments on a large number of texts in whole or in part, regularly quotes from them in English translation, and often supplies the more significant Greek and Latin terms. For discussion of ancient theories, he acknowledges reliance on works by Martha Nussbaum and Richard Sorabji, but his scholarship extends to a wide range of primary sources and other historical studies. His recognition of the bearing of both theological and medical works on his subject is noteworthy: it is a mark of the singularity of emotion—or, as it is sometimes still quaintly called, ‘passion’—as a philosophical theme that it can combine theological and medical considerations, as well as moral and rhetorical ones.

The first and longest chapter, “Emotions in Ancient Philosophy,” begins with discussion of the relevant Platonic and Aristotelian texts, with emphasis on the Republic and Philebus and on the Rhetoric, respectively. The Stoic view of emotion as false judgment, to be expelled through exercises, is considered, and the influential Stoic doctrine of pre-passions or first movements is stressed. More briefly the chapter considers the Epicureans, Galen, the middle Platonists, and Plotinus, and closes with a look at the De natura hominis by the fourth-century bishop Nemesius, a synthesis of ancient thought that had an influential eleventh-century Latin translation. Chapter 2, “Emotions and the Ancient Pursuit of Christian Perfection,” discusses the Alexandrian and Cappadocian Fathers, John Cassian, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Pseudo Dionysius, with remarks on monastic discipline and scriptural interpretation. Origen’s connection of first motions with bad “thoughts” and his distinction between thought and consent are brought out. Augustine naturally gets the most attention here, with sections on City of God, Confessions, and emotions and will.

The third chapter, “Medieval Conceptions of Emotions from Abelard to Aquinas,” is remarkably well constructed. It begins with the theme of first movements, the literature of spiritual experience, and the logic of the will in twelfth and thirteenth-century authors; it then turns to Latin translations of medical treatises and of Avicenna’s faculty psychology; and it closes with early thirteenth-century philosophy, Albert the Great, and Aquinas, author of “the most extensive medieval treatise on the subject” (239), namely Summa theologiae, I–II, QQ.22–48. At only thirty-one pages, the last chapter, “Emotions in Fourteenth-Century Philosophy,” is a coda to the discussion of Aquinas that introduces the themes of intuitive cognition, self-awareness, and free volition, and sketches the views of important Franciscan authors. Scotus and Ockham introduce the notion of “passions of will”; their follower Adam Wodeham considers love as a cognition partially caused by another cognition (277).

Aquinas’s treatise emerges as a focal point, one at which earlier currents converge and from which subsequent lines of thought derive or differ. The author emphasizes Aquinas’s debts to Avicenna and John of la Rochelle, and his original analogy between the “motion” of the soul and physical motion. (Is this analogy plausible beyond the limitations of Aquinas’s physics or is it merely a curiosity? The author offers no opinion on this question.) Readers interested in the theological context of Aquinas’s treatise and further discussion of its philosophical components may wish to consult a work not mentioned in the bibliography: Paul Gondreau...